The Resource Discovery Project is one of the major research units of the Distributed Systems Technology Centre (DSTC). The DSTC is one of over 60 co-operative research centres in Australia and is a Federally and commercially funded non-profit company. The DSTC has over 25 participating organisations which provide resources to the research program, including, direct funding, seconded staff, hardware and software, and importantly, research problems. The Resource Discovery Project was established in mid 1994 after the emerging problem of information discovery on large networks was identified as a crucial research area for Australian data networks.

The goal of the Resource Discovery Project is to investigate issues related to locating, retrieving, and promulgating information in large networked environments. The Internet and WWW provide a challenging environment for deployment of these services. The needs of information publishers – to maximise audience reach – and the user – to minimise information overload – require advanced technical solutions and investigative research.

The Resource Discovery Project framework assumes the three layer architecture. The framework contains the following entities:

• Content Seekers – what technology do users need to find the information they are seeking? What technologies do users need for retrieving and managing resources? Users require software clients with intuitive user interfaces to facilitate and manage simple and complex information retrieval tasks.
• Discovery Services – what mechanisms do you need to store, propagate, and manage the resource descriptions used by the users to select and retrieve resources? Discovery services act as the intermediary between the users and the information providers – matching the needs of the two – to provide a unified view of information repositories.
• Content Providers – how do you describe your resources? Various techniques can be used to provide descriptions of resources (metadata) and to support the management of the organisation’s information publishing strategies. These include tools which automate metadata extraction and support access constraints.

Key Ideas and Goals of the Research

The Resource Discovery Project is aiming to provide timely solutions to some of today’s problems as well as a fundamental and applied research vision.

The following outlines the projects goals, key ideas and research rationale:

• Goal: Allow organisations to effectively disseminate and promote networked information both internally and externally.
• Key Idea: Accurate resource descriptions and robust naming systems are essential for finding resources.
• Research plan: Investigate techniques for describing and identifying resources. Investigate technologies for producing and disseminating resource descriptions and identifiers.
• Goal: Improve information discovery and access across heterogeneous information sources.
• Key Idea: Information and services will be made available in various formats and protocols and no single standard will ever evolve.
• Research plan: Use middleware discovery services to translate between the various formats and standards.
• Goal: Provide scaleable and manageable solutions for networked information promotion and discovery.
• Key Idea: Large information spaces are often distributed, heterogeneous, dynamic, and expanding.
• Research plan: Create scaleable discovery services using distributed middleware techniques.
• Goal: Improve user access to resources through better extraction of information needs and more effective information filtering.
• Key Idea: Users have difficulty expressing their information needs and coping with the large amounts of information which may meet their needs.
• Research plan: Investigate techniques for extracting and applying user information needs and for filtering information.